James Bruce Subscribe
James E. Bruce is an associate professor of philosophy at John Brown University. His first book, Rights in the Law: The Importance of God’s Free Choices in the Thought of Francis Turretin, was published by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in 2013. You can follow him @JamesEBruce
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The Founders’ Go-To Text
In his illuminating Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, Daniel L. Dreisbach shows how early Americans used the Bible both as an intellectual sourcebook and as a tool for moral instruction. He thinks “the Bible was the most authoritative, accessible, and familiar book in eighteenth-century America.” But be comforted, O Unbeliever! This book is not a work of Christian apologetics. “A claim of biblical influence,” Dreisbach writes, “does not suggest that the founders were theocrats intent on imposing a biblical order on the polity.” On the contrary, he says, “Believers and skeptics alike made use of the Bible.” The American…
Does California Care about Students who Question their Sexuality?
California Senate Bill 1146 (SB 1146) created an earthquake of controversy.
Faith, Reason, and the Law
A plausible concern animates Francis J. Beckwith’s Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith. If you don’t get religious rites, you can’t uphold, defend, or even understand religious rights. As Beckwith notes, many with “real legal and political power” as well as “highly respected and influential academics, writers, and media figures” mischaracterize and seem to misunderstand religious beliefs and the people who hold them. One side of the culture wars “sees itself and its advocates as the guardians of rationality” and its opponents as people who adopt “nonrational delusions that deserve no greater constitutional protections or civil respect…
The Permissive Natural Law
Brian Tierney succeeds in his own aims for Liberty and Law: The Idea of Permissive Natural Law, 1100—1800. In his introduction, the noted Cornell medievalist openly admits that this book is “deliberately more descriptive than analytical” and says its chapters should not be read as “a continuous narrative” but as “a series of studies, focused on a common theme and intended, hopefully, to enhance our understanding of its scope and significance.” What Liberty and Law achieves is nothing short of remarkable: it follows the thread of permissive natural law through 700 years of intellectual history. Having written on Rights in the…
Can Social Justice Be Rescued?
The book Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is isn’t what you think it is. The dust jacket of the latest from Michael Novak (with coauthors Paul Adams and Elizabeth Shaw) promises to rescue the term from “its ideological captors” by clarifying “the true meaning of social justice.”
Boringly Familiar and Wildly Utopian
This plebian reviewer read Professor Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? so you wouldn’t have to. Inequality inadvertently persuaded me that its topic is even less important than I’d thought it was when I began. But make no mistake, Atkinson’s a celebrated lion of the Left—the economist whom Thomas Piketty called “the Godfather of historical studies on income and wealth.” If he can’t persuade us inequality is a problem, no one can.
The Contexts of Individual Liberty
At the end of the day, the best and most deeply committed collectivists ought to be advocates of a small and limited government. Why? Because the state isn’t the only collective; it’s just the most obvious one. State collectivism received a devastating critique in James R. Otteson’s recent book (reviewed here), and I want to supplement Otteson’s case: In addition to the solitary individual staring down the centralized bureaucracy, we can think about the collections of individuals in civil society who are greater than the sum of their parts.
